How To: Add Ratings To Your Blog

October 18th, 2007

Have you ever noticed that many blogs now collect instant feedback from their users through a AJAX based rating system? This has become a popular trend around the blogosphere, allowing readers to give quick feedback on your posts instead of requiring them to take the time to submit a comment. As of today, adding a rating system to your blog has just gotten a lot easier.

Whether you use Typepad, Blogger, or WordPress to do your blogging, you can now easily add a rating system to your blog through Outbrain. There is no registration required and it is available for free for you to use. For Typepad and Blogger users, you can use a 1-click installation method to get this done. For WordPress users, you just need to download a WordPress plugin and you’ll be all set.

Ratings Widget

Once setup, Outbrain will place stars below your posts and allow your readers to let you know what posts they like by rating them between 1 and 5 stars. It also looks like it will work with your feed as well, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.

Update: You can now add ratings to your WordPress feed as well.

Yaron Galai says:

Thanks for mentioning the rating widget. To answer the question about the feeds – Right now the ratings are not carried over into the feeds, but that is something we’re going to add in the future.

Hey – why not add the widget to this blog?…

October 18th, 2007 at 10:43 pm

Kyle Eslick says:

Yaron – There is a pretty good chance that will happen. I save site maintenance stuff for the weekends

October 19th, 2007 at 7:42 am

Neil - Acopic SEO says:

Quite like the ratings widget – although maybe they can be a hinderence in certain circumstances.

October 24th, 2007 at 1:52 pm

Neil – Thats what I thought too. In some ways I think this look better than the rating widget though.

My problem is it pushes everything down when you mouSEOver it. No idea why, but for some reason that bothers me. I suppose you could enclose it in a div and add a minimum height to fix that now that I think about it